Rest in Peace

The American Way of Dealing With Death

By JACK HITT

Published: August 18, 2002

NEW YORK CITY has never been good at looking back. It's famous for being set firmly in the present, directed almost entirely at the future of what's next. But now it must look back — at its recent catastrophic past — and then build a memorial. The city has now set a design deadline for Sept. 11, 2003. For a thousand reasons, this isn't going to be easy.

One reason is that America as a culture has changed how it deals with death publicly, and these changes now inform that specialized architectural structure called a memorial. At some point, America decided that the meaning of a person's life can be honored only by never forgetting the circumstances of death. Modern memorials invite us to relive the sensations of the dying and the hideous moments for the survivors on first learning of some tragedy.

Anthropologists from Samoa to Paris say that the funeral service in every culture is a ritualized version of the resurrection story: someone dies, is buried and then lives again. Funerals typically usher the guests through two proceedings. The most intense is at graveside, abrupt and unforgiving. There, the survivors contemplate a hole in the earth and the physical body destined for it. It is gut-wrenching.

The other part of the ceremony occurs elsewhere and usually involves eulogies. The meaning of the person's life is detailed and explained. The survivors then take those things and celebrate them, carrying them back into the world of the living, frequently with a party.

This sequence — moving through the grief, then beyond it — has changed. We talk about closure and healing, but it's just cover for a new anxiety. Instead of honoring the dead by leaving them in the grave, we worry that we disrespect them by moving on. So we dwell on them, revive the worst agonies of death and enlist public sculpture to carry on this grim work for future generations. When it comes to the grave, Americans are no longer moving on, they're moving in.

Consider how the nation honors Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, killed a century apart. We officially celebrate Lincoln's birthday in February. When was Kennedy born? Who knows? We remember him on the day he died, Nov. 22. Lincoln's life and work are memorialized in one of the great architectural edifices, the Lincoln Memorial. The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's breathtaking Second Inaugural are carved in stone. He sits, majestically large, contemplating you as you contemplate him. How did he die? Where did it occur? You won't find out at the Lincoln Memorial.

Kennedy has no such official memorial. But that doesn't stop people from making one: Dealey Plaza, the site of his assassination in Dallas. The book depository still stands. Some version of the grassy knoll. A visit can mean only one thing: to relive that single moment, looping in our minds as a silent procession of black limos broken by an unnerving pop and then Jackie Kennedy bounding out of the back of the car in search of something — now lost forever. So we honor Kennedy by maintaining our gaze on that most intense moment of suffering.

"Like so many things, our idea of death and burial changed during the 60's," said Gary Laderman, a professor of religion at Emory University and the author of the forthcoming "Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in 20th Century America." With the end of the Vietnam War, Professor Laderman explained, came a period of uncertainty in how the nation thought about the dead. "The simple funeral-home burial had once been universal across all classes, races and religions," he said. "But suddenly one could experiment. There was a real surge in alternative rituals — cremations, burial societies, roadside shrines, political movements like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. You get a series of improvisations, trying to perpetuate the presence of death."

The desire to honor Kennedy's death by perpetually reliving that moment in Dallas has trickled down. Some parents seem to believe that the most sincere way to honor the pain of a child's death is by channeling the loss into a political crusade. This is done largely by confronting a legislature with the unassuageable grief of graveside death. Who can rebut such emotion with the dry claims of reason? If the parents prevail, a new public awareness program is created, or even better, a new law bearing the child's name — a postmodern memorial.

At a recent Supreme Court oral argument, two sides debated whether drug-testing kids in after-school programs like the chess club was constitutional. Outside, a sharper debate went on. Brown folder-clutching policy experts, who opposed the drug testing, debated the placard-bearing mothers of children killed by drug use.

The experts relied on reason and their knowledge of unintended consequences.

The mothers had their surviving children with them. Each family had recentered its reason for being around the painful memory of the dead child. They were devoted to redeeming this death by ensuring that all children be drug-tested. No one could deny the depth of their anguish. There seemed no possible response to their arguments, which were lamentations of pain. The experts' monographs were useless.

The American way of death had become a way of life. And now those changes in the public display of emotion have affected public sculpture.